Clark University - Clark News winter 2005
Paths to peace: Profile of Becky Phillips
(winter 2005)
Promoting Peace through Reconciliation
Back to Paths to Peace
By Tammy Griffin-Kumpey
Psychology graduate student Rebecca Phillips says forgiveness is at the heart of advancing peace at home and across the globe. Currently, Phillips is working on a project that will help increase forgiveness in African communities that have suffered the atrocities of genocide.
Phillips knows the plight of these African people all too well. As an undergraduate, Phillips began her research in Rwanda working with child-headed households and other genocide survivors. She translated, from French to English, stories of the genocide as told by widows and orphans and is now doing research based on those stories.
Phillips says a critical issue in Rwanda is that almost all of the genocidaires are being released after 10 years of imprisonment. (Genocidaires is the French word for criminals who take part in a genocide.) However, there really hasn¹t been much justice. Although the 10-year sentence was just for some, many others deserved longer sentences for their crimes, and still others, imprisoned for lesser genocide-related crimes like looting, feel their terms were unfair punishment for their crimes.
According to Phillips, true justice isn't possible in this situation. She says there are 100,000 genocidaires waiting to be tried in Rwanda; and if all were tried through the traditional court process, it would take 100 years. And because the Rwandan prisons are full beyond capacity, they've had no choice but to release the criminals.
Phillips says many of the genocide survivors are understandably bitter‹they want justice and revenge. ³How do you bring these criminals back into the community, without hurting the survivors more?² she asks. "How do you help the survivors to forgive their neighbors who are moving back into the community after killing their family members? How do you get them together as a community?"
Although the process is not easy, Phillips says that even victims of intense traumas can forgive and move toward reconciliation. She is testing perspective-taking methods used in America on African immigrants living in Worcester. In doing so, she hopes to discover a process that will help survivors of genocide forgive, and the genocidaires to acknowledge their crimes even if justice in the traditional sense cannot occur. When Phillips finds a process that it is effective, she plans to return to Rwanda to try it there for her dissertation.
Phillips says forgiveness will come easier for the survivors if they can acknowledge and express their side of the story, and then take the perspective of the killer and tell the story from the killer's side. Taking the other person's perspective, she asserts, helps promote forgiveness; forgiveness leads to reconciliation; reconciliation promotes peace.
Phillips emphasizes that if the survivors cannot find forgiveness and work toward reconciliation, the violence in Rwanda will not end. "There's no way that Rwanda can continue to grow and work as a nation unless they get beyond this," she says. "It's this bad mixture of they have every right to forever hate the killer of their family, but they need to put it away for society's sake, so they can move on and live a good life."
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